Max vs. The Water Buffalo

I leaned left around a turn before the second bridge, about halfway back to camp. I didn't see the water buffalo until it was too late. He charged out of the mangroves, the wide arc horns lowering and snout sputtering, his dumb staring eyes glowing in the headlights. I swerved instinctually and missed him by inches, but when I leaned hard the other way to correct, the tires hit a patch of soft earth and I went into a slide.
"Shit shit shiiiiiit!"
I felt it coming... WHAM!
Going about 40 mph, my right knee slammed into a concrete post on the side of the road. I was thrown from the bike. The next moments are hazy memories of tumbling end-over-end in the air -- tree branches and bushes thwack twack -- then sploosh, I sank into the murky swamp water.

-- From Wanderlost, by Ben Olson.

Max vs. The Gel-Hair Pricks

By the time we finally met up with Liz and her friends at the bar next to the Pepsi Center -- Brooklyn's I think it was called -- we were both shit-faced... me cocky and waving my arms at everything, storming around in my Viking helmet and yelling at passersby, and Regan a swerving, stuttering, giggling mess.
We barged into the bar and scanned the tables for Liz's crew, the milling crowd of people halting their conversations mid-sentence, glancing over at me with strange looks. I saw Liz surrounded by a group of clean-looking people with shirts tucked in and shiny shoes, and she waved us over -- a mortified look on her face.
"What the hell are you wearing?" she yelled, ushering us over to the table, where she introduced me to all of her friends. Regan accidentally hugged one of Liz's blond friends I didn't know and howled," Heeey Liz, so nice to finally meet you!" "No, I'm Liz." The women were all mid-twenties professionals and the men wore standard-issue striped shirts with open collars and gel in their faux-hawks, shiny flat-bottom shoes that they must issue everyone under thirty-two who makes over $40k a year. They all looked like a bunch of assholes. Everyone was somewhat taken aback to be shaking hands with a bearded drunk Viking and Regan, whose eyeballs were each pointing a different direction.
"Um, this is my friend Max," Liz told them meekly.
One of the Gel-Hair Pricks tilted his head and upturned his smarmy nose at me. "What are you supposed to be?"
"Drunk," I barked, then turned back to Liz. "You think we have time to order some chicken wings? We'd really love some chicken wings. We're starving."

-- From Wanderlost, by Ben Olson.

Jeremiah Junkyard

... an off-white wood house all dilapidated and sagging with age and sorrow, yellowish water stains on the siding, surrounded by dead aspen trees and a field bejeweled with scrap metal, old trucks, car parts, railroad ties, washing machines, farm equipment, gutted boxcars, and there he is, the junkyard man himself -- exactly like i would picture a guy living in a plot of land like this -- big sloppy belly covered in a grimy green sweatshirt, thick Jeremiah Johnson beard and Davy Jones wool cap -- walking around his junk heap with a small cigar in his fat jowls, piling junk in certain stacks -- there's an order to it! All this time I thought these junkyard hounds just threw shit in piles and let them rot, but now it seems that junkyard man, Jeremiah Junkyard they call him, has a method... oh, to know this method, to hear his thoughts beside Interstate 70 and the cross-country railroad tracks, wedged between the two arteries of long-haulers and living in a world his own -- a man living out on the edge of it all, off the grid, smoking a Backwoods cigar and pondering at a small camp trailer he's been looking at the past few minutes. Spits onto the ground, stamps his feet, wearing old work books, and hitches up his pants with a Civil War-esque light gray stripe running up the vertical side of the leg -- pacing up and down the trailer, checking out the front, the ball hitch, kicking the tires, a yapping dog at his heels, stamps his feet again and kicks at the old scraggy mutt as the conductor puts us into GO and Jeremiah Junkyard, my junkyard prophet, my dirt farmer in the sun, I'll see you again perhaps -- Lord of the Junkyard -- and now he's gone... just a snapshot. My snapshot.

-- From Wanderlost, by Ben Olson.

Ian Flannigan

"Yess!" I heard Flannigan, the wide-eyed, thick-sideburned Irish poet yell from the other end of the booth. He bent over the composition notebook open on the table and scribbled a few words, then threw it over to a group of huddled hipsters talking in the corner: "Write something!"

-- From Wanderlost, by Ben Olson.